The Absolute Beginners Guide to SEO By Jamie Cawley By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 1
Contents Introduction... 3 What is SEO?... 4 Frequently Used Terms... 5 What is a Good Amount of Traffic?... 8 Number of Searches vs SEO Traffic... 10 How Many Competitors are To Many?... 11 What is a Weak Competitor?... 11 Moving Forward... 12 Copyright 2010 By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 2
Introduction If you are just getting started with internet marketing and ecommerce there is one abbreviation that you will constantly find on: Forums Blogs Books Software This abbreviation is SEO. In this guide you will learn: What SEO is Frequently used terms relating to SEO What is a good amount of traffic Examples of how traffic and conversion rates impact on your income The difference between SEO searches and SEO traffic What makes SEO competition strong So let s get started! J. Cawley By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 3
What is SEO? SEO is the common abbreviation for Search Engine Optimization. SEO involves optimizing a website content and design, along with carrying out promotion such as link building so it will be fully indexed by the search engines and rank highly in search results. The main search engines targeted tend to be: Google Yahoo Bing By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 4
Frequently Used Terms Adwords: A pay-per-click advertising program that delivers paid advertisements via Google. Google Analytics: Records and reports visitor traffic and behavior Avg CPC: Average Cost Per Click is the average amount an advertiser pays every time one of their ads is clicked. Backlink: Link from one site pointing to another. A vital part of SEO and should be relevant to the content of your site to be effective and help improve your ranking and traffic. Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors coming to a page and leaving without clicking through any other elements, such as links or images, on that page. Click Through Rate: The number of visitors clicking on one of your displayed ads. Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors that take an action you wish such as placing an order, filling out a form, etc. By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 5
Spiders and Crawling: A spider is a program used by a search engine to index websites. The process that the spider goes through when it visits your site and gathers information is referred to as crawling. Density: The frequency that a keyword appears on a web page. Duplicated Content: Refers to a repeated block of content, either on a website, or on the Internet. Google penalizes duplicated content by removing them from Google's index. If you are relying on traffic from search engines make sure all of your content is unique. Meta Tag: HTML used to provide a summary of content to be used by search engines to index web documents. Page Rank: How well a site is ranked within a search engine. Plug-in: Application installed into a program that adds extra functionality. Prominence: How close the keywords and phrases are to the top of a web page. Affected by title tags and meta tags. Keywords prominence should be 60% or higher for your primary keyword. Ranking: The position of a webpage within a Search Engine Results Page. By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 6
ROI: Return on Investment is used to calculate how much income you will get compared with the cost of paying for something. SEM: Search Engine Marketing. Advertising and marketing a website or product via pay per click advertising such as Adwords, email marketing, etc. Organic Traffic: Visitors coming to your website via search engines or other links. Not paid advertising. Black Hat SEO: Much like the name implies underhanded techniques to promote a website such as link hijacking. Search engines are quick to ban sites that use these practices. White Hat SEO: Use of SEO techniques that are honest and abide by the guidelines of the search engines without trying to trick internet users. By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 7
What is a Good Amount of Traffic? This depends a great deal on your conversion rate. The higher your conversion rate, the more likely visitors will buy, and therefore you would make more money than if you had the same number of visitors to a site with a lower conversion rate. For example If you received 100 visitors per day to a sales page where you make $ 10.00 per sale Conversion rate of 2.4% (the industry average) 100 visitors per day x 30 = 3,000 visitors per month 3,000 visitors per month x 2.4% = 72 sales 72 sales x $ 10 per sale = $ 720 monthly sales from 2.4% conversion rate Conversion rate of 4% (common industry rate) 100 visitors per day x 30 = 3,000 visitors per month 3,000 visitors per month x 4% = 120 sales 120 sales x $ 10 per sale = $ 1,200 monthly sales from 4% conversion rate By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 8
As you can see from this example, a higher conversion rate makes a big difference. If instead we use the same conversion rate or 2.4% and only focus on traffic numbers, in order to make the same amount of money these are the number of visitors you need. Traffic needed using same conversion rate $ 720 monthly sales $ 720 / $10 per sale = 72 sales needed 72 / 2.4% = 3,000 visitors needed per month 3,000 visitors per month / 30 days = 100 visitors per day needed to make $ 720 per month $ 1,200 monthly sales $ 1,200 / $10 per sale = 120 sales needed 120 / 2.4% = 5,000 visitors needed per month 5,000 visitors per month / 30 days = 167 visitors per day needed to make $ 1,200 per month So in order to be earning $ 1,200 per month in the examples above you would need to either increase your conversion rate by 1.6% OR get 67 more visitors to your site per day. By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 9
Number of Searches vs SEO Traffic Not everyone that searches for your keywords will visit your website. In the search results for Google the # 1 position only gets approximately 42% of searchers actually click on the link, and therefore become visitors. For example 100 searches per day in Google = 42 visitors to your website if you are ranked # 1 As you go down the first page of Google each position gets dramatically fewer and fewer clicks, with the # 10 spot at the bottom of the first page only receiving visitors from about 1.5% of searchers. If you wanted 100 visitors per day and rank # 1 in Google then you would need to target keywords that received at least 238 searches per day 100 visitors / 42% = 238 searches By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 10
How Many Competitors are To Many? This is something that is very much dependent on the overall strength of your website. The stronger, more established and optimized your site, the greater the number of competitors you can take on. For a new domain and website it is best to stay under 30,000. What is a Weak Competitor? Competitors with low page ranks, poorly optimized websites and/or few backlinks do not require a great deal of work to overtake. Where a competitor has a high page rank, a large number of backlinks and is fully optimized they are very strong and far more difficult to overtake in Google. Competitor strength is relative to your own website. The stronger your site, the stronger the competitors you can take on. By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 11
Moving Forward Congratulations! You now have enough knowledge to begin dipping your toes into the wonderful world of SEO. There are a wide range of tools available that can help you find out more about how many searches certain keywords get per day and how strong your competition is. Two tools that I highly recommend you use are: Market Samurai (free trial) Excellent, easy to use tool for getting front-page rankings, traffic and sales. Click here to find out more SEOQuake (free) A powerful tool for website browsers, aimed at helping with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Click here to get it now By Jamie C - BusinessStart-upOnline.com Page 12